Why Democracy Shouldn’t End at the Office Door

The Strange Contradiction of Living as Citizens but Working as Subjects.

Political equality is a foundational principle of true democracies. But even as we aspire to this ideal, however imperfectly, within the American public sphere, millions of working people spend half their lives laboring to advance collective enterprises that are governed in ways that are fundamentally incompatible with it. This deep and strange contradiction in our lives is not controversial. In fact, it’s barely noticed.

For the good of workers, corporations and our democracy, it’s time we paid more attention to it.

What is political equality? The principle flows out of the more fundamental principle of moral equality, which asserts that all human beings possess equal, intrinsic moral worth (but not necessarily equal talents) and deserve equal consideration (but not necessarily equal outcomes), regardless of status, ability, race, or gender.

Many philosophers through the ages – including most notably Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau – have argued the centrality of moral equality to the human condition. Kant famously argued that all persons have the same intrinsic moral value simply by being persons, and that no one’s interests count more just because of who they are. Rousseau wrote in The Social Contract, “Since no man has any natural authority over his fellow men, and since force is not the source of right, conventions” – meaning human-made agreements – “remain as the basis of all lawful authority among men.”

The derivative principle of political equality refers, in the words of democracy theorist and Renovator founder Danielle Allen, to our basic need to be the autonomous authors of our lives, free from domination by individuals or groups. This freedom includes the ability to participate meaningfully in decisions that directly affect our own welfare in both civil society and in the institutions of political governance. In this context, the word “political” refers to being involved in a governance system in which participants typically have nonidentical interests.

From our nation’s very beginning, our Founders understood that political equality was the key to a lived democracy – that no activity claiming to be democratic can truly be democratic unless the principle of political equality is baked into that activity.

And so this understanding has become a central feature of American constitutional theory. The principle of political equality has been affirmed in a succession of legislation and court cases, though there is still a large gap between theory and practice when it comes to campaign finance.

Unfortunately, the principle of political equality does not easily extend to our work lives.

In civic life, you live under a political government where decision-making authority is accountable to the citizenry by means of the Constitution. In work, you live under an economic government where corporate decision-makers are largely unaccountable to a wide range of constituencies, including employees, who typically have highly limited representation and influence over business policies and practices that can deeply affect their welfare.

Photo by Dylan Nolte via Unsplash.

It’s easy to see that these two governance systems are at odds, even incompatible. We live, by and large, as if this profound bifurcation doesn’t matter. But does it?

Does it matter, in other words, that the working public is asked to straddle two very different ways of life? That one sphere depends for its very success on the participation of the people as politically active citizens of a democracy, while the other expects their service as workers but not their input on matters profoundly affecting their interests?

For those, like me, who believe that we all have a fundamental right to political equality, the answer has to be a resounding yes – this discordance does matter. If, following Kant and Rousseau, we accept that no adult should live at the mercy of unchecked power in the public sphere, it is difficult to understand why that same adult should be expected to submit to it in the workplace, where so much of their current and future welfare is rooted.

But in addition to this moral argument, there are practical political and business reasons for the state, the corporation, and individuals to want to make large commercial enterprises more democracy-supporting.

---

For the state: Public support for our democratic capitalism falters when participants in a whole sector of our political economy spend most of their waking hours working for corporations where their preferences and interests are dominated by layers of superiors. Especially when the expected economic benefits of joining such enterprises (growth in personal income, increased social mobility) fail to materialize, can anyone be surprised if public confidence in our entire economic and political governance system collapses – as has in fact happened quite dramatically in recent years?

Disappointment in one sector of our political economy quickly infects attitudes toward all other sectors. This dynamic should trouble all strong supporters of democratic capitalism.

For the corporation: The extremely limited participation rights of non-management employees on matters affecting their welfare inevitably create high coordination costs. There’s a cost to the incentives and disciplines required to convince employees to cooperate with non-negotiable directives – a simple matter of being paid to cooperate. Employees who feel that they have a say and a stake in how they work are more likely to work efficiently and effectively with less oversight.

A second cost is that authoritarian decision structures tend to inhibit opportunities for those with important local knowledge (like plant- or field-level employees) to push back against corporate policies and practices that don’t work. Companies are more efficient when they pay attention to good ideas, whether they come from a corner office or the factory floor.

Some companies, like John Deere and the major automotive manufacturers discovered this decades ago and organized direct feedback loops (referred to variously as Quality of Work Life or Employee Involvement programs, Mutual Growth Forums, and National Training Committees). These run from work groups to supervising managers, and they focus on improving operational effectiveness to the economic advantage of the corporation and its employees alike. This long-standing practice is consistent with a well-established principle of effective management, namely placing policy-making and control in the hands of those who really know what’s going on at the relevant organizational levels.

For the individual: Being consulted about matters affecting one’s welfare inevitably contributes to a sense of mutuality in the pursuit of a corporation’s business and financial goals. This sharing of a valued common purpose is vastly preferred by most people to a resentful working life focused more on getting “a square deal” from one’s employer.

Everyone wins, in other words, when employers and employees share power in the workplace. But it is not enough to understand that. We still need to ask what can be done to make our business enterprises more democracy-supporting. In this series of columns, I will argue for forms of power-sharing in which employees are granted real “voice” on practices affecting their current welfare and future prospects — not to weaken enterprise, but to strengthen both our economy and the democratic character of our common life.

This is the first in a series of columns by Professor Salter on expanding equality in the workplace. These columns were adapted from his book, The Fading Light of Democratic Capitalism, published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.

---

Do you feel that you and your employees or coworkers have a say in your workplace, and that you’re all treated as equals? What would it look like if you did?